I.B.M. Ring 362
The Maine Mystics
Bangor, Maine

Ring Report
September 16, 2007

The September Meeting was held at the Friars' Bakehouse in Bangor, Maine. The theme of the meeting was Big Box Magic, magic with items from big box stores. Ring members scoured discount stores and hardware giants for props.

Conjuring Carroll, working on a shoestring budget, showed a shoestring, a handkerchief, and a ring. A young volunteer held the ends of the shoestring. Conjuring Carroll caused the ring to thread onto the shoestring under cover of the handkerchief. Dayton Salisbury caused a marked coin to vanish. It appeared in a nest of boxes that had been wrapped in a ball of wool. Alan Drew couldn't relate to the theme, and gave an encore performance of the Mismade Bill ( February 2007).

Brother Don Paul showed a deck of jumbo cards acquired for one dollar. He wrote a prediction on the face of one card and tossed it into a hat. He spread the deck face down, and Danny Baker picked a card. Danny first read the prediction, then had a look at his card. Brother Don was right! Brother Don followed this by having a cheap calculator checked by the Ring's Treasurer for accuracy. Meanwhile, he had three audience members write down a three-digit number each. Randy totaled the numbers, then read Brother Don's prediction taped to the back of the calculator. He was right again!

Danny Baker demonstrated the operation of the Acme Magic Ring-Kleen. A borrowed ring was unfortunately reduced to a worthless lump of metal before a careful reading of the instruction manual provided a magical solution. The restored ring was recovered from inside of a ball of wool. Scot Grassette performed "The Trick That Fooled Einstein," demonstrating his ability to make surprisingly accurate predictions about coins picked from a big glass goblet. Scot repeated the feat with change from his pocket. Wes Booth dealt the four Aces to the table, topping each with three other cards. One at a time, the aces vanished from the packets; the last packet of four contained all the Aces. Wes followed with a very fluid rope routine, cutting and restoring rope, making knots fall off, and performing the Professor's Nightmare with some nice extra touches.

Dr. Wilson came straight from the hardware store with one hundred feet of rope, two concrete cinderblocks, and a fifty dollar bill. He invited anyone in the crowd to tie him up. Brother Don Paul took the bait, and was offered fifty dollars if it took Dr. Wilson longer to escape than it did to tie him up. Brother Don did a great job in just over six minutes; Dr. Wilson was out in two minutes. He vowed to do it again in October as a publicity stunt for the Worldwide Escape Artist Relay, offering to bet that he would get newspaper coverage for an escape using twenty bucks worth of props from the hardware store. No one took the bet. Dr. Wilson then presented a Teaching Table on Publicity.

Full details of the business meeting and photos are available on the Ring's web site (www.ibmring362.org).